Month: April 2012

When I eventually walk out on my wife, when I leave her to her own devices, stepping boldly into a thrilling new life of excessive booze, ample air hostesses, time-laden days, sleep-filled nights and dazzling tell-the-whole-world-about-it-freedom, there is no flourish.

Or how such a long story (993 pages) can start with such a small sentence. The Wise Man’s Fear is the second book in The Kingkiller Chronicle (it looks like a trilogy but I’m not sure) and it’s what I would like to call old-fashioned fantasy. There is a dollop of straight up fantasy in the fantasy book, told by a trouper who is part of the stories and makes the stories even bigger and bolder when retelling them. There is a comfort in the heaviness of the book, the thoroughness of world-building and how easily accessible every character is, their role cut out for them.
This means that there is little surprise in the story lines, but -for me- that was absolutely no bother. Known fairy tales are well known for a reason.

I read the first book a couple of years ago and couldn’t remember much about the premises. That wasn’t necessary, as I quickly discovered. The Kingkiller Chronicle tells about Kvothe telling the stories of his (young) life, missing the first book means just missing a part of that. Patrick Rothfuss simply assumes you know this world he writes about, so there is no repetition or explaining. Just take it.

And I took it and thoroughly enjoyed it, skipping lunch breaks to continue reading because it’s simply a book like that. Only once did the thought of ‘This could have been shortened’ pop up and that was during a ballad on a woman’s body and the following sex. Other might love that.
Fantasy fans should definitely take a peek at this series.

Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the story of Jaffy Brown, a street urchin living at the end of the nineteenth century. His life turns into an adventure when he is eaten by a tiger, meets the people and animals of Jamrach’s Menagerie but most importantly: when he goes to sea to catch a dragon in the far south.

I didn’t get this from the Children/Young Adult division, but it could easily fit there along other ‘boy adventures’. The reader follows Jaffy from nine years old to adulthood, but his view on the world, adventures and misadventures, never changes. He’s good with animals, so he can hang out with every one of them in the Menagerie. He’s allowed to come along with the quest for a dragon (because that would make the Menagerie even better) and only doubts the danger of it for a moment.

It takes Jamrach’s Menagerie a while to get up to speed. I really felt like I needed to push myself through the first eighty pages, but after that it’s situation after accident after adventure and there isn’t even time left to breathe or doze off. It’s a colourful story with extensive descriptions on the countries they visit, animals they see and people they meet. It shows how dangerous travel by ship can be and how resilient humankind. From time to time it reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean, and it’s up there in unpretentious fun (but with more blood and gore).

Out is a lot. It shows daily life in contemporary Japan (the majority of the time through the eyes of women, but men also feature), it’s a study on how far a human can be pushed and adjust to a situation, it’s a thriller and a game of cat and mouse between two people who start out as very different, but have more in common than expected.

With so much going on, it isn’t so easy to say where this book is about, but the first thing that starts everything off is a woman strangling her husband, her admitting it to a colleague and her colleague helping her with covering this up. This and the disposal of the body seem to be successful, until more and more players get in on the secret and they all want something else from it, from the always broke colleague to the falsely-accused night club owner.
All this shows there is no such thing as a clean cut, no-loose-threads ending when it comes to anything that involves humans (yes, also outside of murder). Every characters copes (or doesn’t) in her/his own way, making the knot that ties them together bigger and tougher to escape from.

I took Out out from the library because it plays in Japan with (native) inhabitants, far away from the usual ‘white-view’ books I read. And though some information made me sad (women over 30 won’t ever be promoted in office life, men are more important in every situation), it was also very interesting and made me wonder how different the story would have been if it would have been set in The States or anywhere in Europe.

The thriller part of this book is the least exciting of everything Out has. Pick it up for the people, the plot lines and the society.

Back again in the world of the Chaos Walking Trilogy. After searching for hope at the end of the brutal trip in The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and The Answer has no place for hope, continuing with the story of what happens after Todd and Viola are caught by the people they were trying to outrun.

Todd gives in pretty fast, stops his struggle and tries to separate himself from the world. On the other side, Viola fights more bitterly and desperately, which also doesn’t make for a happy story. It makes the book a tad more sluggish and repetitive up till the point the reader might exclaim ‘Not again!’
Does this make this a bad story? Of course not. There is still the world and the people and ideas in it that carry the story, while next to that it’s hurting but understandable to see how Todd retreats into himself. There’s no place for laughs any more, and -like most second books in a trilogy- it’s pretty clear that it’s all a build up for the final part.

So burn through this one as you did with the first -with your teeth on edge and hope against hope (and realizing how scary a battle between sexes can be). Realizing that the two most important characters are just teenagers make their horrors more believable and might stop you to think about what you’d do.
While in the mean time I curse myself for finishing this book on Easter Sunday and therefore being unable to get the final book from the library.